3/10

It's a big-budget bore!

The outstanding problem with this movie is that it doesn't know what genre it's supposed to be. Is it a sci-fi … a young-teen movie … a comedy-drama … a fantasy … what? If you're going to throw $320 million at a movie, the you'd think the directors, writers and producers would have a clear idea of what they're trying to achieve. It finishes up being a jumbled blend of many genres and it fails them all. I suspect that there was serious studio executive interference in the writing and production of this movie.

My first view of the posters and trailers for the movie sparked my interest, especially the scenes of the battles between the strangely designed robots that look part comical and part menacing. It looked like a mix of Terminator, Black Mirror and WALL-E. Unfortunately, longer trailers revealed the movie had a typically pretty teen girl protagonist teamed with a roughneck bloke and some wisecracking anthropomorphic robots. My hopes for the movie were then squashed.

The film is so jammed with foreshadowing and exposition that it drains all the suspense out of the story. There are no significant surprises or plot twists to draw you to the end and leave you thinking. Movies with potential cult appeal should leave you thinking about what you saw, or you're engaged by a compelling story arc, or you want to revisit parts to try and understand ambiguous or exciting scenes. The Electric State fails all criteria for becoming a cult movie. Had the movie been darker and more hard-edged Sci-Fi, then it could have attracted cult appeal.

I think the robots were supposed to be funny. I think. I did enjoy some of the more subtle background jokes, like Disney building robots, the Windows 3.1 screensaver, and some other retro-tech references.

The action scenes were reasonably impressive, but they suffered from being colour desaturated and had that typical washed-out grey-blue appearance (I am personally utterly fed-up with colour desaturation, and I blame The Lord of The Rings and The Matrix trilogies for starting the trend). When some of the robots "died" in battle I didn't feel any empathy for them at all, so they failed to created a WALL-E type of emotional connection with the audience.

Overall, the plot development was slow and predictable, the dialogue was corny, the jokes were lame, the action was intermittent and colourless and all the characters were one-dimensional. This movie has no revisit value.

The 'Science'

"The machines became sentient (and probably decided to kill all humans)" has become a rather tedious trope in modern Sci-Fi movies. Famous examples that come to mind are Colossus: The Forbin Project, The Terminator series, War Games, The Matrix series, Blade Runner, Ex Machina, and many more modern ones inspired by living in the age of AI. As a science nerd who works in IT, I can switch off part of my brain and enjoy these kinds of plots for entertainment, but there is a deep underlying technical problem with the concept of "living machines" that script writers tend to overlook, and I don't blame them, because the subject is so complicated that it would paralyze audiences with boredom when discussing the differences between Von Neumann architecture and vertebrate brains.

At one point in the movie we paused it and had a casual discussion about the idea of "living machines" and discussed the android Data, the androids in Blade Runner and the machine civilisations that inhabit Stanisław Lem's The Cyberiad. I discuss the latter in my web page devoted to Stanisław Lem.

This discussion was more interesting than the movie.

I chuckled aloud in the long exposition at the start of the movie when it said "the robots grew tired of the lives we assigned them and they demanded lives of their own". I nodded in agreement when Skynet became sentient and nuked humanity, but it was comedy cringe when the robots flipped personalities in this movie (I wonder if it was caused by a software update).

I don't mind movies that are scientifically inaccurate, so long as they Hand Wave over the details or don't attempt to explain everything and dig themselves into a hole. I do mind movies that are scientifically inconsistent and take themselves too seriously, as this movie seemed to.

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